I'll Give You the Sun

by Jandy Nelson

  “It’s weird to scratch someone else’s nose,” I tell her.

  “Just wait until you’re a parent.”

  “It’s much squishier than it looks,” I say. She smiles at me and it sends a warm summer breeze around the room.

  “You’re happy,” I say, but only meant to think it. My new trombone of a voice makes it sound like an accusation, which I guess it is. Not only is she happier since Dad’s been gone, she’s actually in a room when she’s in a room. She’s returned from the Milky Way. She even got drenched along with Jude and me in a downpour the other day.

  She stops kneading.

  “How come you didn’t cook like this when Dad lived here?” I ask, instead of what I want to ask: How come you don’t miss him? How come he had to leave for you to become normal again?

  She sighs. “I don’t know.” She traces her finger through a mound of flour, starts spelling her name. Her face is closing up.

  “It smells incredible,” I say, wanting her happiness back, needing it and hating it at the same time.

  She smiles faintly. “Have a piece of pie and a turnover. I won’t tell your sister.”

  I nod, grab a knife and cut an enormous slice, a quarter of the pan practically, and put it on a dinner plate. Then I take a turnover. Since I’ve become King Kong, I can’t get enough food in me ever. I’m heading over to the table with my full plate, the smell making me want to walk on my hands, when Jude’s bad mood ambles in.

  The eye-roll is a 10.5 on the Richter. The Big One. California has slipped into the ocean. She puts her hands on her hips, exasperated. “What’s your problem, Noah?”

  “How’d you get free anyway,” I say, my mouth full of turnover.

  “Free?” Mom asks.

  “I tied her up so she wouldn’t be tempted to come in here and eat.”

  Mom laughs. “Jude, I know you’re furious with me. It doesn’t mean you can’t have a turnover for breakfast.”

  “Never!” She walks across the room and takes a box of Cheerios from a cabinet and pours some into a sad old bowl.

  “I think I used up all the milk,” Mom says.

  “Of course you did!” Jude cries, sounding a lot like a braying donkey. She sits down next to me, crunching and martyring her way through the bowl of dry cereal, eyeing my plate the whole time. When Mom’s back is turned, I slide it over to her with the fork and she shovels pastry in until her mouth is stuffed, then slides it back over.

  It’s this moment that Brian Connelly comes through the door.

  “I knocked,” he says nervously. He’s older, taller, hatless, and he’s cut his hair—the white bonfire is gone.

  I involuntarily jump up, then sit down, then jump up again, because this is what normal people do when someone walks into a room, right? Jude kicks me under the table, gives me a look that says: Stop being a freak, then tries to smile at Brian, but her mouth is too stuffed with pie, so she makes a weird disfigured chipmunk face at him. I certainly can’t talk because I’m too busy jumping up and down.

  Fortunately, there’s Mom.

  “Well, hello.” She wipes her hands on her apron, walks over, and shakes his hand. “Welcome back.”

  “Thank you,” he replies. “Good to be back.” He takes a deep breath. “We can smell what you’re baking all the way down at our house. We were salivating over our cornflakes.”

  “Please,” Mom says. “Help yourself. I’m going through a little cooking phase. And certainly bring something back for your mother.”

  Brian looks at the counter with longing. “Maybe later.” His eyes travel to me. He licks his bottom lip and the gesture, so familiar, makes my heart lurch.

  Somewhere in between up and down, I’ve frozen: humpbacked, arms swinging monkey-like. I register how crazy I look in the puzzled expression on his face. I choose up. Whew. Up was the right move! I’m standing. I’m a person on legs, which are designed for this purpose. And he’s five feet away, now four, three, two—

  He’s in front of me.

  Brian Connelly is standing in front of me.

  What’s left of his hair is a deep buttery yellow. His eyes, his eyes, his amazing squinting eyes! are going to make me lose consciousness. There’s nothing hiding them anymore. I’m surprised all the passengers didn’t follow him off the plane and aren’t waiting outside the door. I want to draw him. Now. I want to do everything. Now.

  (PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Two Boys Racing into Brightness)

  I try to calm myself by counting his freckles to see if there are any that are new.

  “Stare much?” he says quietly so only I hear. Practically the first words he ever said to me, all those months ago. His lips curl into the half smile. I catch his tongue poised on the precipice between his front teeth.

  “You look different,” I say, wishing it didn’t come out so dreamily.

  “Me? Dude, you’re huge. I think you’re bigger than me. How’d that happen?”

  I glance down. “Yeah, super far from the toes now.” This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about. My toes are pretty much in another time zone.

  He cracks up and then I do, and the sound of our laughter getting all mixed up together is like a time machine and we’re instantly back to last summer, the days in the woods, the nights on his roof. We haven’t talked in five months and we both look like different people, but it’s the same, same, same. I notice Mom watching us curiously, intently, not totally comprehending what she’s seeing, like we’re some foreign movie with no subtitles.

  Brian turns to Jude, who’s finally managed to get her food down. “Hey,” he says.

  She waves, then goes back to her dry Cheerios. It’s true. There’s nothing between them. It was probably like being in an elevator with a stranger in that closet. I get a pang of guilt over what I did in that closet.

  “Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?”

  “Oh my God,” Brian exclaims. “I forgot! I can’t believe I’ve gone months without thinking about the whereabouts of Ralph!”

  “Quite an existential dilemma that parrot has put us all in,” Mom says, smiling at him.

  He returns her smile, then meets my eyes. “Ready?” he says, like we have some plan.

  I notice he doesn’t have his meteorite bag and see out the window it’s probably going to pour any minute, but we need to get out of here. Immediately. “We’re going to search for meteorites,” I say, like that’s what most people do on winter mornings. I never really told either of them too much about last summer, which is reflected in both of their flummoxed faces. But who freaking cares?

  Not us.

  In a flash, we’re through the door, across the street and into the woods, running for no reason and laughing for no reason and totally out of breath and out of our minds when Brian catches me by my shirt, whips me around, and with one strong hand flat against my chest, he pushes me against a tree and kisses me so hard I go blind.

  • • •

  The blindness lasts just a second, then the colors start flooding into me: not through my eyes but right through my skin, replacing blood and bone, muscle and sinew, until I am redorangebluegreenpurpleyellowredorangebluegreenpurpleyellow.

  Brian pulls away and looks at me. “Fuck,” he says. “I’ve wanted to do that for so long.” His breath’s on my face. “So long. You’re just . . .” He doesn’t finish, instead he brushes my cheek with the back of his hand. The gesture is startling, atom-splitting, because it’s so unexpected, so tender. As is the look in his eyes. It makes my chest ache with joy, horses-plunging-into-rivers joy.

  “God,” I whisper. “It’s happening.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  I think the heart of every living thing on earth is beating in my body.

  I run my hands through his hair, finally, finally, then bring his head to mine and kiss him so hard our teeth collide, p
lanets collide, kissing him now for each and every time we didn’t all summer long. I know absolutely everything about how to kiss him too, how to make his whole body tremble just from biting his lip, how to make him moan right inside my mouth by whispering his name, how to make his head fall back, his spine arch, how to make him groan through his teeth. It’s like I’ve taken every class there is on the subject. And even as I’m kissing him and kissing him and kissing him, I wish I were kissing him, wanting more, more, more, more, like I can’t get enough, never will be able to get enough.

  “We’re them,” I think/say, stopping for a moment to catch my breath, my life, our mouths inches apart, our foreheads pressed together now.

  “Who?” His voice is a rasp. It creates an immediate riot in my blood, so I can’t tell him about the guys in the alcove at the party. Instead, I place my hands under his shirt, because I can now, I can do everything I’ve thought and thought and thought about. I touch the river of his stomach, his chest and shoulders. He whispers the word yeah under his breath, which makes me shudder, which makes him shudder, and then his hands travel under my shirt and the demanding hungry feel of them on my skin burns me to the ground.

  Love, I think and think and think and think and don’t say. Don’t say it.

  Don’t say it. Don’t tell him you love him.

  But I do. I love him more than anything.

  I close my eyes and drown in color, open them and drown in light because billions and billions of buckets of light are being emptied on our heads from above.

  This is it. This is freaking everything. This is the painting painting itself.

  And that’s what I’m thinking when the asteroid comes crashing into us.

  “No one can know,” he says. “Ever.”

  I step back, look at him. In an instant, he’s turned into a siren. The whole forest goes mum. It doesn’t want anything to do with what he just said either.

  He says more calmly, “It’d be the end. Of everything. My athletic scholarship at Forrester. I’m the assistant captain of the varsity team as a sophomore and—”

  I want him to be quiet. I want him back with me. I want his face to look the way it did a minute ago when I touched his stomach, his chest, when he brushed my cheek with his hand. I lift up his shirt, slip it over his talking head, then take off my own, and step into him so we’re all lined up, legs to legs, groin to groin, bare chest to bare chest. His breath hitches. We fit perfectly. I kiss him slowly and deeply until the only word he can manage is my name.

  He says it again.

  And again.

  Until we’re two lit candles melting into one.

  “No one’s gonna find out. Don’t worry,” I whisper, not caring if everyone in the whole world knows, not caring about anything except more now him and me under the open sky as thunder cracks and the rain comes down.

  • • •

  I’m propped on my bed drawing Brian, who’s a few feet away at my desk watching a meteor shower on some astronomy site he’s addicted to. In the drawing, the stars and planets are storming out of the computer screen and into the room. This is the first time we’ve seen each other since the woods except for the kabillion times I’ve seen him in my mind over the last few days, which included Christmas. What happened between us has colonized every last brain cell. I can barely tie my shoelaces. I forgot how to chew this morning.

  I thought maybe he’d hide from me for the rest of our lives, but a few minutes after I heard his mom’s car pull into the garage today, signaling their return from some Buddhist center up north, he was at my window. I’ve listened to an endless state of the intergalactic union and now we’re fighting about whose Christmas was worse. He’s acting like what happened between us didn’t happen, so I am too. Well, trying to. My heart’s bigger than a blue whale’s, which needs its own parking spot. Not to mention my eight feet of concrete, which has kept me perpetually in the shower. I am so clean. If there’s a drought, blame me.

  In fact, I just happen to be thinking about the shower, him and me in it, thinking about hot water sliding down our naked bodies, thinking about pressing him against the wall, about gliding my hands all over him, thinking about the sounds he’d make, how he’d throw his head back and say yeah like he did in the woods, thinking all this, as I tell him in an even, controlled voice how Jude and I spent Christmas in Dad’s hotel room eating takeout Chinese food and breathing gray air. It’s amazing how many things you can do at once. It’s amazing how what goes on in the head stays in the head.

  (SELF-PORTRAIT: Do Not Disturb)

  “Give it up,” he says. “No way you can beat this. I had to go to an all-day sit with my mom and then sleep on the floor on a mat and eat gross gruel for Christmas dinner. I got a prayer from the monks as my only present. A prayer for peace! I repeat: an all-day sit, me! I couldn’t say anything. Or do anything. For eight hours. And then gruel and a prayer!” He starts laughing and I catch it immediately. “And I had to wear a robe. A fricken dress.” He turns around, lit up like a lantern. “And what’s worse is the whole time, I couldn’t stop thinking about . . .”

  I see him tremble. Oh God.

  “It was so painful, dude. Luckily we had these weird pillow things on our laps so no one knew. Sucked.” He’s staring at my mouth. “And didn’t suck too.” He turns back to the stars.

  I see him shudder again.

  My hand goes limp and I drop my pencil. He can’t stop thinking about it either.

  He swivels around. “So, who were the ‘them’ you mentioned, anyway?”

  It takes me a second but then I understand. “I saw these guys making out at that party.”

  His brow furrows. “The party where you hooked up with Heather?”

  For months, I’ve been so pissed at him and Jude about something that didn’t happen, it never occurred to me that he could be mad at me about what actually did. Is he still? Is that why he never called or emailed? I want to tell him what really happened. I want to say sorry. Because I am. Instead, I just say, “Yeah, that party. They were . . .”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, amazing or something . . .”

  “Why?” His talking is turning into breathing. There’s no answer. Really, they were amazing only because they were guys kissing.

  I tell him, “I decided I’d give up all my fingers, if . . .”

  “If what?” he presses.

  I realize I can’t possibly say it aloud but don’t have to because he does. “If it could’ve been us, right? I saw them too.”

  It’s a thousand degrees in me.

  “It’d be hard to draw with no fingers,” he says.

  “I’d manage.”

  I close my eyes, unable to contain the feeling inside me and when I open them a second later, it’s like he’s gotten hitched on a hook and I’m the hook. I follow his gaze to my bare stomach—my shirt’s ridden up—then lower to where there’s no hiding how I’m feeling. I think he’s Tasering me or something, because I can’t move.

  He swallows, swivels back around to face the computer, and puts a hand on the mouse but doesn’t click the screensaver away. I watch his other hand travel down.

  Still looking at the screen, he asks, “Want to?” and I’m a flood in a paper cup.

  “Totally,” I say, knowing without a doubt what he means, and then our hands are on our belts, unbuckling. From across the room, I watch his back, unable to see much, but then his neck arches, and I can see his face, his eyes all swimming and wild, locking with mine, and it’s like we’re kissing again, but from across the room this time, kissing even more intensely than in the woods, where our pants stayed on. I didn’t know you could kiss with your eyes. I didn’t know anything. And then the colors are forcing down the walls of the room, the walls of me—

  Then, the impossible.

  My mother as in my mother bursts in, waving a magazine. I
thought I’d locked the door. I could’ve sworn I locked it!

  “This is the best essay I’ve ever read on Picasso, you’re going—” Her confused gaze darts from me to Brian. His hands, my hands, fumbling, shoving, zipping.

  “Oh,” she says. “Oh. Oh.”

  Then the door’s closed and she’s gone, like she was never there, like she hadn’t seen a thing.

  • • •

  She doesn’t pretend it didn’t happen.

  An hour after Brian’s frantic dive-bomb out the window, there’s a knock at my bedroom door. I say nothing, just flip on my desk light so she doesn’t find me sitting in the dark, where I’ve been since he left. I grab a pencil, start to draw, but my hand won’t stop shaking, so I can’t make a decent line.

  “Noah, I’m coming in.”

  All the blood in my body mad-dashes to my face as the door slowly opens. I want to die.

  “I’d like to talk to you, honey,” she says in the same voice she uses when talking to Crazy Charlie, the town loon.

  Whatever. Whatever. Whatever, I chant in my head, drilling the pencil into the pad. I’m hunched over the paper now, hugging it practically, so I don’t have to see her. Whole forests are burning out of control inside me. How come she doesn’t know to leave me alone for the next fifty years after what just happened?

  Her hand touches my shoulder as she passes. I cringe.

  From the bed where she’s sat down, she says, “Love’s so complicated, Noah, isn’t it?”

  I go rigid. Why did she say that? Why is she using the word love?

  I throw the pencil down.

  “It’s okay what you’re feeling. It’s natural.”

  A giant No slams through me. How does she know what I’m feeling? How does she know anything about anything? She doesn’t. She can’t. She can’t just barge into my most secret world and then try to show me around it. Get out, I want to holler at her. Get out of my room. Get out of my life. Get out of my paintings. Get out of everything! Blow back to your realm already and leave me alone. How can you take this experience away from me before I’ve even gotten to experience it? I want to say all these things but can’t make any words. I can hardly breathe.